Join Us In Supporting the Ada Developers Academy

Sep 11, 2013 • substantial

We're happy to announce our involvement with the Ada Developers Academy, a new software development school in Seattle exclusively for women. Hiring developer talent can be extremely difficult, a task made even more challenging when you're looking to build diverse teams and 85% of software developers are male. There's a lot of opportunity for improvement in the tech community and we're happy to help ADA by sponsoring and by helping them organizationally (Dave, our CTO sits on the steering committee). We'd like to ask you to support them by donating to their Indiegogo campaign and helping to spread the word.

ADA is not-for-profit, and is offering its classes to students without any tuition and the possibility of a monthly stipend, leaving students more able to fully immerse themselves in the intensive program. At the end of the 24-week program, students will be a full stack developer, with knowledge of Ruby, Rails, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript. At that point they enter into an apprenticeship at a local company putting their new skills to use. Applications will be opening soon, and the start date will be announced closer to the end of the month.

Why this matters:
- There are 20k STEM jobs unfilled in Washington, 65% in computer science
- 85% of software developers are male
- Seattle has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the country
- Only 1.5% of open-source contributors are women
- Diverse teams have been shown to frequently outperform homogeneous teams
- It's the right thing to do